Prologue to “Sweet River Pearl”

My Ma was a whore and a damn good one, too. Once she made up her mind to be one at age 13, she never looked back, and eventually rose to the top of the “whore hierarchy,” out west. She called herself Pearl, “Sweet River” Pearl, and it would be nearly 35 years before I found out what the “Sweet River” meant. Every time I’d ask her, she’d say, “Wait til’ you’re growed up.” I’d wait, a month or so, then ask again. Same answer. It was the same thing with her last name.

“Ma, what’s your last name?”

“Ring,” she’d say, smiling.

“Pearl Ring?” I’d ask, not believing it. “Then how come my last name is Hurt?”

“Cuz that was yore daddy’s name,” she’d say, and on and on it would go. I never did know her real last name, the one she was born with. For a long time I thought it must be something awful or embarrassing like “Necklace.” I mean why hide your name, especially from your own kid? Once, when I had asked her for about the 500th time, she said flat-out in frustration: “Nobody gives a shit squat what a woman’s maiden name is.” After that it was about a year before I got the gumption to ask her again.

Ma was born in Missouri. Her folks, my grandparents, worked a small farm near Rucker, and according to Ma, neither one of them was worth a damn. I could always hear her disgust when she mentioned her folks, which wasn’t often.

“My ma sure drove her ducks to a poor market when she married Abner,” she once said. “Though she tweren’t no prize herself.” Her pa must have been the laziest man alive. “He wouldn’t work any crops unless they could be sold for likker, and even then he was always sucklin’ a hoe handle.” As a result, she said, “We was poor as Job’s turkey. Had to lean on the fence just to gobble.” Her pa drank up whatever money his crops brought in and it was only the small garden tended by her ma that kept them from starving. That explained why Pearl, whenever she had the chance, always wolfed down enough food for three people.

“I’m always hungry,” she said. “Growin’ up my stomach thought my throat was cut.” Watching her eat was not a sight for the faint of heart. She’d use a long knife to stab a piece of meat off her plate and then pull the morsel off the blade tip with her teeth. It was a miracle she never sliced up her lips or poked a hole in the back of her throat. Her movements were so fast it was a source of amazement whenever she ate in public. Men in the saloons would stop what they were doing just to watch, their mouths hanging open in a trout look. I had to learn to eat fast because of Ma, for she would spear every crumb on her plate and then start eyeballing what was left on mine.

“That there food’s gettin’ cold,” would be her first warning, her hand gripping the 10-inch knife, her dark eyes locked on my portion like a hawk’s on a mouse. I’d eat faster, hoping to finish before her final call came, which was a demanding, “You gonna eat that?”

Soon after her no-account pa died, Pearl lit out from the farm, hitching a ride on a hay wagon to the nearest big town. There she discovered she could actually make money “givin’ menfolk what they craves,” as she described it, and her future was set.

Pearl was what folks in Missouri called a “big boned gal,” meaning big shoulders, tits and hips and a big voice. She also wore a pair of big, black, short-top boots, which became her trademark. She was proud of them. I could always tell when Ma was on the prod because those boots would be clomping so loud the lamps in the hall would be shaking. It was like a bell on a cat. You knew when Pearl was around. I watched her stomp a roach once and there was no trace of it afterwards. The whole thing had been smashed through the wood grain of the floor.

Ma wished to be treated like a woman by her customers, but when some acted like she was a rented mule, they got “the boot,” literally. More than a few misbehaving johns ended up speaking an octave or two higher after tangling with “Sweet River” Pearl. If her boot didn’t solve the problem, she could always use her knife, which most of the men knew she could handle like an expert, just from watching her eat.

Now you might think my Ma was big and ugly and you would be as wrong as red rain. Pearl was quite pretty and men flocked to her like flies to a sugar cake. She had “presence” and all eyes turned to her when she entered a room (the clomping boots helped a bit, too). Men were in awe of her because she was unlike any woman they had known. She’d sit in a chair like a man, legs apart, elbows on the table and match them drink for drink, all the while spouting language that would peel the paint off the walls of their “respectable” homes. At the same time she never let them forget she was all woman, giving them an anatomical display that kept their hearts beating fast and the whiskey flowing.

She had worked some of the roughest saloons in the state of Missouri and that meant some of the roughest anywhere. The last saloon she worked there, Cuthbert’s in Fayette, was where I was conceived. She called Fayette “a little piss-ant poke and plumb town. You poke yer head out the window and you were plumb outa town.”

“It was just a crossroads,” she went on, “And all them roads leadin’ to nowhere.” She must’ve gotten into a peck of trouble there, because according to Ma, she had to sneak out one night and leave the state, stealing a wagon and a team of horses to do so. All this while she was swelled up with me. That’s how I came to be born in Omaha, Nebraska.

I never knew my daddy. Ma says he was a doctor named Joshua Hurt. She was never as closed-mouthed about him as she was herself, but she must’ve figured that a young boy had better know something about his pa, just so he’d know a little bit about himself. From what she recalled, he came from a rich family back east and that he had had a falling out with his pa and came west to seek his fortune. He ended up in Fayette. This was back during the Civil War when Fayette was some sort of boomtown, filled with Yankee soldiers. Joshua met Pearl in the saloon she worked at and soon he was stitchin’ up customers after nightly brawls.

For a long time that was all Ma would say about him. Then one night, when I was about 10, she got into a mouth-war with her boss at the time, a slimy gopher named Cutler Dean. He was skimming money from her nightly take and was expecting Pearl to pay out of her own pocket for new bedclothes. “That sumbitch is so tight he wouldn’t give a penny to see the Resurrection,” Ma said in disgust. She took to hittin’ the jug until late into the evening and by midnight she was ready to talk someone’s ear off and I was handy. So I took advantage of this opportunity and asked her, “Ma, what did my daddy look like?”

She rolled her eyes and sighed real loud. “Gaw,” she said, slouching far back into her chair. “He was shuch a looker. Besht lookin’ john I ever knowed. Well, that ain’t true, there wuz another fella I’d met ‘bout the shame time, but he tweren’t no john. You know I never take my boots off when tendin’ to a cushtomer, but boy and howdy, I took my boots off for Doc Josh. Took em’ off and shlid them under his bed. Moved in with him that shame night.”

Sitting up, she squinted her eyes at me and said, “Yep, you got his eyes and yore hair’s wavy like his was. You got my bones, though. He was a shlim jim and had the prettiesht danged hands. Good hands fer a doctor and countin’ money.”

Now you are probably thinking, with her being a whore, how does she know for sure that this man was my daddy? Well, I asked Ma that, knowing her well enough while she was tanked that I wouldn’t get smacked in the jibs for doing so.

“I wuz a Madame at the time,” she said proudly. I wuz ‘keeper of the kitties,’ as they shay. Yore pa wuz the only man I had for shome months. Thatís how I knowed he’s the one. He was makin’ me angry, though. He washn’t right in the head. He’d gone and married some fanshy pants widder woman, tryin’ to git her property. Left me alone many a night.”

“Is that why you left town?” I asked, being cautious.

“Naw, that ain’t it,” she said, averting her eyes. “That damn town was gettin’ too rough for the likes of me, a pregger woman. I wanted to shtart fresh.” I knew from her evasive tone that she wasn’t telling me everything, but I let it alone. But I had to ask one more question.

“Whatever happened to my pa?” With the saddest expression I had ever seen on her, she said softly, “Josh, I don’t know. I surely don’t know. I left all that behind and come out wesht to make shomethin’ better for you and me.”

I guess that’s what this story is about.